Life Is Rich

With the recent hurricanes, presidential election and the economic “crisis”, there has been no shortage of news, doom and gloom to coat the airwaves and fill headlines and bylines. That’s why with some peculiarity that I found myself two weeks ago passing gas station after another that was shuttered with no fuel. When one station a few blocks from my house finally received a shipment, a line of over 150 cars formed with people being told that the wait was over two hours. I decided to get up early the following day, finding the line to be a more acceptable 20 or so cars. The attendant stated that they had about three hours of gas left. A half hour later, I had myself a tank full of gas. Last week, I found another station with fairly short lines to fill up my wife’s minivan. I was the last person that day to get gas from that station. They ran out… Needless to say, tempers were high, and folks weren’t terribly pleased with the situation. I got out of there before it got ugly.

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I’ve been watching with a bit of glee as the indie Mac / iPhone development community is starting to rally behind the insanity that is the iPhone App Store and it’s related policies. My only question – what the hell took you so long!?!?

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While I still have some pretty serious issues with Apple and their Gestapo-like tactics with respect to the iPhone, I’m still quite engendered to the device. The big news this week is the release of the first much-anticipated Google Android based phone, the Google G1. The Google Android mobile phone operating system has been seen as a possible modern competitor to the iPhone hegemony, supporting the coolness but dropping the stranglehold lock on the consumer.

What a steaming pile. So much for openness. Android was supposed to herald freedom to the consumer – freedom from carrier lock-in, freedom from hardware and software lock-in, freedom from all forms of anti-consumer pro-corporation ass-hattery. Yet, I’m forced to use Google, forced to use proprietary accessories (no headphone jack), forced to use T-Mobile, forced to use YouTube for any video, forced to use a completely locked-down Bluetooth. Some of these will hopefully be remedied by 3rd-party software developers. Many can not.

What a crock. To resort to the well-worn cliché, EPIC FAIL.

I’ve never hidden the fact that I don’t have a college degree. I’ve attended college off and on for probably 6 years and 150 or so credit hours. I just never did it in any succinct and organized manner that resulted in a degree. This is primarily due to my macro-scale attention deficit disorder that makes it very difficult for me to spend that much time focused in one domain space.

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I’ve always been a Honda fan. My “first” car was a 1989 Honda Accord. Since, I’ve owned two Honda Accords, one Honda Prelude, and two Acura Integras (Hondas). My wife currently drives a Honda Odyssey and I drive a 1998 Honda Accord.

If I had my choice, I probably would never own anything but Honda. Unfortunately, Honda hasn’t been keeping up with the Hybrid bandwagon which I’m keenly interested in (I also am a fan of AWD, which is missing across Honda’s lines). The Prius is an amazing (if ugly) car. I just can’t stand Toyota. It’s kinda like a sports team thing. Not totally rational, just the way I feel. But considering the options and Honda’s recent deficiencies in the Hybrid market, I was afraid I was going to have to stray from my favored brand.

I’ve been pretty confident that Honda knows of this deficiency and has been trying to work it out. Sure enough, CNN Money just published an article about the new Honda Insight – a complete overhaul of the first pure-hybrid car in America. For a Hybrid, it actually looks pretty good.

Now if it only was AWD, did 0-60 sub 5 seconds, had the clutch / manual transmission and handling characteristics of an S2000, and still got 50+ mpg, I would be in heaven. (Actually, the Honda CR-Z concept looks like it might be getting close).

More information available at the Honda website.

The other day I came across an interesting article on the death of software patents (and many other patent types for that matter). I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t verify the validity of the claims – maybe my young uber-smart lawyer brother can comment, but taken at face value, this poses an interesting conundrum for the technology industry.

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